Spam

Spam Email

Spam has been the bane of email almost since the invention of email.  The term "spam" is the nickname given to unsolicited commercial email.  It gets the name from a Monty Python sketch that involves a couple ordering a meal in a diner.  All of the menu choices have spam in them, with each choice seemingly having more spam than the next.  The patrons in the background also began chanting "spam" until pretty much everything in the diner is overwhelmed with the word "spam" to the exclusion of everything else.

That is the same problem we generally face with spam email.  It can become so overwhelming, that our inbox can file with so much unwanted repetitive nonsense that we cannot find the emails we really want.  At one point in 2014, about 80% of all emails sent were classified as spam.

Spam is not only merely annoying.  It can be dangerous.  Spam messages can provide links to infected web sites, can try to lure you into revealing your account names and passwords, or can contain attachments that infect your computer with malware.  Years ago, I used to click on links in spam just out of curiosity to what they were about.  But with the dangers that can exist today, I don't click on any unknown links and never open an attachment from an unknown source.  Getting a zip file attachment from an unknown source is a particular red flag that danger could be packed inside.

Combating Spam

Efforts to combat spam are difficult.  Authorities have shut down or blocked major spam servers.  Spammers then turned to infecting millions of individual computers all over the world and turning each one into individual mail servers to send spam.  This has made it impossible to choke it off at the source.  But all major email providers are focused on this problem.  They have managed to reduce spam traffic to around 50% of all messages, but this is still very high.

Working with Spam in Gmail

Before we had Gmail, we had a centralized anti-spam system in place.  Thousands of emails were dumped into a central file which typically was only checked if someone asked us to see if something ended up there accidentally.  With Gmail, there is no longer any central spam location.  Every user sees all incoming email addressed to them, but with Gmail putting suspected spam into a special folder labelled "spam."

I have found Gmail's anti-spam algorithms to be highly accurate.  It relies on the feedback of its users to classify messages.  If large numbers of people mark a message as spam, then similar messages get classified as spam automatically and are sent to a user's spam folder.  Similarly, if enough people mark a message in "spam" as not spam, Gmail learns that similar emails should not be sent to the spam folder in the future.

Going through one's spam folder can be a tedious and time consuming process.  At one point, I was receiving over 200 spam messages each day.  Even though that number has now dropped to about 30-40 each day, that is more time than I care so spend looking at ads.

Spam Folder Maintenance

Different people take different approaches to spam.  Some people look at all of them individually, some ignore them, some simply delete them without much review.  Personally, I fall into the "ignore" category and recommend that to others as well.  Because I find Google's spam filter to be so accurate, I am fairly confident that anything in the spam folder is not something I want to see.  As a result, I only look in that folder if I think something was sent to me and I did not get it.  Otherwise, I ignore that folder.  Reading through all those messages is simply a waste of time.

On the other hand, I also don't delete my spam.  Google holds spam messages in your spam folder for 30 days, then deletes them automatically.  Deleting your spam en masse without reviewing it means it is gone forever.  If some important email did go to spam and your realize it later, you cannot recover it after you have deleted it.  On the other hand, leaving your spam folder alone, means you have 30 days to realize some important email might be in there and give you a chance to search for it.  After 30 days, Google deletes it forever, so you don't have to worry about them continuing to pile up and use up your available space.

Searching Your Spam

If you need to search for something in your spam folder, you must specify it in your search.  By default, Gmail search does not include results from spam or trash when you do a general email search.  If you want to search your spam, you musty type "in:spam" before the search time.  For example, if I wanted to search for the word "computer" in my spam folder, I would search "in:spam computer"   If I find something I want to save, I simply open it, click on the "not spam" button at the top of the screen, and it moves to my inbox.  In doing this, I am also automatically telling Google that similar items should not be considered spam and Google gets smarter about how it classifies future similar emails.